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Just as the sympathizers constitute a protective wall around the members of the movement and represent the outside world to them, so the ordinary membership surrounds the militant groups and represents the normal outside world to them.
The reason why the movements in their prepower, revolutionary stage can attract so many ordinary philistines is that their members live in a fool’s paradise of normalcy;
The SA, the stormtroopers (founded in 1922), were the first Nazi formation which was supposed to be more militant than the party itself;68 in 1926, the SS was founded as the elite formation of the SA; after three years, the SS was separated from the SA and put under Himmler’s command; it took Himmler only a few more years to repeat the same game within the SS.
The SA and the SS were certainly model organizations for arbitrary violence and murder; they were hardly as well trained as the Black Reichswehr, and they were not equipped for a fight against regular troops.
The difference between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in this respect was only that the Nazis had a pronounced tendency to consider these paraprofessional formations as part of the party elite, while the Communists preferred to recruit from them the material for their front organizations.
This technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the “decomposition of the status quo”78 which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force.
They could change overnight the whole structure of German society—and not just political life—precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within their own ranks.
the stormtroopers were never assigned to duty in their home communities,
Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement;
Being in the center of the movement, the Leader can act as though he were above it.
It was of course a comedy, and even an expensive one, when 80 million Germans set out to look for Jewish grandfathers; yet everybody came out of the examination with the feeling that he belonged to a group of included which stood against an imaginary multitude of ineligibles.
They are to some extent the natural outcome of the conspiracy fiction of totalitarianism whose organizations supposedly have been founded to counteract secret societies—the
The Nazis, moreover, because of their militaristic tradition and prejudices, originally modeled their elite formations after the army, while the Bolsheviks from the beginning endowed the secret police with the exercise of supreme power. Yet after a few years this difference too disappeared:
whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations, and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and unbearable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it.
SA in the face of the murder of a beloved leader (Röhm) and hundreds of close comrades was a curious spectacle. At that moment probably Röhm, and not Hitler, had the power of the Reichswehr behind him. But these incidents in the Nazi movement have by now been overshadowed by the ever-repeated spectacle of self-confessed “criminals” in the Bolshevik parties. Trials based on absurd confessions have become part of an internally all-important and externally incomprehensible ritual.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds.
to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating
has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good.
The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences;
The tremendous shock of disillusion which the Red Army suffered on its conquering trip to Europe could be cured only by concentration camps and forced exile for a large part of the occupation troops;
Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.
the decision regarding success and failure under totalitarian circumstances is very largely a matter of organized and terrorized public opinion. In a totally fictitious world, failures need not be recorded, admitted, and remembered.
The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth.
Power means a direct confrontation with reality, and totalitarianism in power is constantly concerned with overcoming this challenge.
every bit of factual information that leaks through the iron curtain, set up against the ever-threatening flood of reality from the other, nontotalitarian side, is a greater menace to totalitarian domination than counterpropaganda has been to totalitarian movements.
it establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction;
What happened instead was that terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition, so that it looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of terror (as liberal accusers of the regime were wont to assert) but the last impediment to its full fury.
they never bothered to abolish officially the Weimar constitution; they even left the civil services more or less intact—a fact which induced many native and foreign observers to hope for restraint of the party and for rapid normalization of the new regime. But when with the issuance of the Nuremberg Laws this development had come to an end, it turned out that the Nazis themselves showed no concern whatsoever about their own legislation.
The Soviet Union, where the prerevolutionary civil services had been exterminated in the revolution and the regime had paid scant attention to constitutional questions during the period of revolutionary change, even went to the trouble of issuing an entirely new and very elaborate constitution in 1936
the publication of the constitution turned out to be the beginning of the gigantic superpurge which in nearly two years liquidated the existing administration and erased all traces of normal life and economic recovery which had developed in the four years after the liquidation of kulaks and enforced collectivization of the rural population.
the constitution of 1936 played exactly the same role the Weimar constitution played under the Nazi regime: it was completely disregarded but never abolished;
the Nazis simply retained the existing administration and deprived it of all power, Stalin had to revive his shadow government, which in the early thirties had lost all its functions and was half forgotten in Russia; he introduced the Soviet constitution as the symbol of the existence as well as the powerlessness of the Soviets.
the word is to be taken as seriously and as literally as the Nazis meant it—can have only a direction, and that any form of legal or governmental structure can be only a handicap to a movement which is being propelled with increasing speed in a certain direction.
He had to develop a kind of sixth sense to know at a given moment whom to obey and whom to disregard.
Soviet regime relies even more on constant creation of new offices to put the former centers of power in the shadow.
Co-existent with this department is another police division of the party itself, which again watches everybody, including the agents of the NKVD, and whose members are not known to the rival body. Added to these two espionage organizations must be the unions in the factories, which must see to it that the workers fulfill their prescribed quotas.
the Bolshevik party, which recruits its members openly and is recognized as the ruling class, has less power than the secret police. Real power begins where secrecy begins.
Totalitarian domination, however, aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in general, and by no means at a restriction of freedom no matter how tyrannical.
To the service of the Gestapo Himmler first added the Security Service, originally a division of the SS and founded as an inner-party police body.
This is but one of many indications that the totalitarian form of government has very little to do with lust for power or even the desire for a power-generating machine, with the game of power for power’s sake which has been characteristic of the last stages of imperialist rule.
isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure.
prevented their formation by constant shifts in power and authority, and frequent changes of intimates in his immediate surroundings, so that all former solidarity between those who had come into power with him quickly evaporated.
The absence of a ruling clique has made the question of a successor to the totalitarian dictator especially baffling and troublesome.
“As the ultimate factor I must, in all modesty, name my own person: irreplaceable. . . .
The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence;
Russia should not have been able to afford the purges in the thirties that interrupted a long-awaited economic recovery, or the physical destruction of the Red Army general staff, which led almost to a defeat in the Russian-Finnish war.
the Nazis showed a certain tendency to retain technical and administrative skill, to allow profits in business, and to dominate economically without too much interference.
